Zune Cards in Our Forums: What's the Solution?

[Jason Dunn]

Someone asked in our forums what our plans were for the Zune cards - whether or not we had plans to allow the integration of Zune cards into our forums. I've been thinking about that since they were announced - you've probably noticed our forums here are quite...&quot;clean&quot; in terms of sigs. I <em>really</em> dislike forums where people have massive, ugly signatures with huge graphics. The signatures steal all the visual focus away from the message - they often look like virtual graffiti. It might be great for some forums and communities, but not this one. In our forums, the <em>message </em>the person is posting should be the most important thing - their sig is just something extra.<br /><br />I'm just starting to think about how we might implement this. At the very least, if I want it to not look terrible, I think we'd have to customize the Zune Thoughts vBulletin template and expand the left-hand column that shows the username, # of posts, etc. The Zune card would have to fit in there - what sucks is how huge they made the Zune cards - I would have preferred to have an even smaller option for embedding, with some sort of a fly-out Flash function. The problem though is that I'm not sure if we can implement that in the template system without having to hack vBulletin - hacks make upgrades PAINFUL, so I never do it. Let me ponder this some more...but I'm definitely interested in ideas from the community, especially from people experienced with vBulletin and vBulletin template design. I still know much more about how phpBB works than vBulletin, so much of this is new to me.

[Adam Krebs]

Why not just have the Zune tag linked under the typical username stuff? We don't need a flashy (get it?) widget, just the link. In the user profile option (going to a member.php page), there could be space for the full ZuneCard.

This is a crappy mockup I made in Paint of how it might look:

http://i9.tinypic.com/714kj9y.jpg

[Khidr]

This guy (http://zunenuze.net/) noted that the zune cards can be resized fairly well - if you look at the way he sized his, it actually holds up well in a smaller format.

I'm not sure how helpful that really is, other than showing that the code can be written so that the cards aren't obtrusive.

[Rocco Augusto]

I'm just starting to think about how we might implement this....

An easy, no nonsense, solution would be to use CSS to set a hard height on the signature container as well as setting it to not allow overflow in the signature container. This way if someone does try to use a really large and annoying signature, it will just be cut off :)

[yslee]

No. Please. No.

[ACE]

I'm actually a member over at ZuneBoards, where they have incorporated the small ZuneCards into sigs, but the site seems to lag more due to them.... they're a nice feature, but unless you have the resources, they can bog servers down.....

[ACE]

Hey here's an alternative to resource hogging flash ZuneCards (yes it's a link to another Zune site, but that's where the information is: http://www.zuneboards.com/content/view/202/1/

Here's what mine looks like (no flash!)
http://card.mygamercard.net/apps/zune/dominiej.png